


Beating to Windward

by Atropos_lee



Series: Windward [3]
Category: Hornblower (TV), Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: Alternate Universe - Live Kennedy Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atropos_lee/pseuds/Atropos_lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1833: An Ancient Mariner on an unexpected journey of remembrance<br/>Spoilers for the entire Hornblower canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beating to Windward

*******  
 _"O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been_  
Alone on a wide, wide sea:  
So lonely 'twas, that God himself  
Scarce seemed there to be."

from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

*******

On a bitter, black day in the January of 1833, a solitary figure could be seen making its way through the streets of Portsmouth, against a searching east-wind. Anyone who paused long enough to take a second look might have recognised the tread of a seaman; the cut of his heavy coat, the gloved hands clasped in the small of his back even in that flinty cold, all suggestive of an officer, some half-pay hero of Aboukir Bay or Camperdown. But as such are common in England's foremost port, few would have been inclined to look closer on a bleak day such as this.

His unremarked route took him from the bustle of the hard towards the steeper streets of Southsea, to the door of a narrow house, opened by a smart manservant who indicated that the occupants were not at home to visitors.

Beyond the half open door the caller could see the neat hallway, and a parlour with a brisk coal fire, all the more inviting for the contrast with the cold. He turned to leave, then with a moment's hesitation, pulled off a glove to search his pockets, and leave his card.

Some fifteen minutes later he was standing in the churchyard of St Thomas á Beckett, beside a stone half hidden by rank grass and rotten snow, which read, in small letters:

_Sacred_  
to the memory of  
Horatio Hornblower  
1804 ~ 1807  
Maria Hornblower  
1806 ~ 1807 

And then continued, in a more florid style:

_& also of their mother_  
Maria, Widow of Capt. Horatio Hornblower,  
of the Sutherland of 74 guns,  
who, much afflicted by the Martyrdom of her Husband  
at the hand of the Enemy:  
Departed this life  
At the age of 35 years  
1811 

_For all flesh is as grafs,_  
and all the glory of man as the flower of grafs.  
The grafs withereth,  
and the flower thereof falleth away 

Admiral Lord Hornblower stood for only the second time at the grave of his wife and children, withered and fallen away more than twenty years since. That quotation had the touch of his mother-in-law, grief and sentiment winning out for once against her habitual cheese-paring economy.

Blank space had been left below for further inscription, never filled. Perhaps it had been intended for the child, whose birth had been the occasion of Maria's death. It was certainly not for him, who at the time those last lines had been added had been a fugitive in France.

Maria died alone. By the time he had escaped and made his way back to England, and public acclaim, she had already been lying in this dull city churchyard for four months. She died alone and unknown, and now she and their children would lie for all time alone; he would be laid to rest beside his second wife in the chillingly elegant marble vault on his estate at Smallbridge.

But even as Hornblower reminded himself of his failings as husband and father, he knew that he had not traveled to Portsmouth to visit this grave, but one even older, which he knew to be here, somewhere, although in forty years he had never sought it out.

It was not easily found, in a neglected corner, sloping a little off-centre, and blackened by the smoke of all the chimneys of Portsmouth. 

_Geo. Clayton_  
Beloved Son of  
Geo.  & Sar. Clayton  
of Leith  
23 Jan. 1793 

There had been an unseemly argument in the gunroom of the Justinian over the inscription. Stonemasons charged by the letter, and the purse of a dead peacetime midshipman does not stretch far - hence the many contractions.

Hornblower's own contribution had exhausted his funds for months to come, and had still only covered half the date.

Yet Clayton came to his pointless and sordid end on Hornblower's behalf. This death had been on his conscience for forty years, and was only the first on the long butcher's bill he had yet to pay.

Standing in the filthy Southsea snow Hornblower was again assailed, as he had been for the past 5 days and nights, by that long list, by the images of his dead, in peace and war. In sudden flashes he saw them, like fighting ships illuminated by the explosive light of powder. Baby Horatio, burning with fever, clutching his father's finger in a tiny paper-dry hand. The long white hair of Nathaniel Sweet floating in the water seconds before a musket shot sent him to the bottom of the channel. Little Midshipman Longley, beside him on the deck of the Sutherland, white-faced and weeping, holding his torn jacket across his chest, and screaming "I am not frightened. I am not frightened" in the endless seconds before grapeshot resolved his body into bloody mist. 

British, Spanish, French, men and women, some weeping, some swearing, some struck dumb in sheer bewilderment in the moment of their ending, drowned, roasted, smashed to pulp or simply rotting inch by inch in the stinking darkness of the orlop, and all added to the long roll of debt.

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass...

_...warm flesh, golden flesh, sweet beneath my fingertips - the sweet living skin of William Bush, laced with scars, but salt and warm and glorious and shivering at my touch_

Hornblower was suddenly sickened by his inability to keep even death clean of desire.

Bush had been erased in an instant by the explosion of a powder barge at the quays at Caudebec in the year fourteen.  
Not withered, not fallen, not even sent in honour in to the sea floor, but blown into a greasy slick and a few filthy rags on the choppy harbour water.

Not even a forgotten grave, like this, the first he had dug. A life-time ago some incomprehensible impulse had caused this Clayton to intervene in a duel Hornblower himself had provoked, and take the shot that would have killed him. But for that quixotic sacrifice the career of Admiral Hornblower would have ended in obscurity, at seventeen, and a Midshipman Hornblower would have rotted, alone and unmourned in the narrow space at his feet.

His thoughts were so focused on that moment in his past that when he finally turned away from the grave he was not in the least surprised to find himself looking at the broad smile of Midshipman Kennedy.

*******

 

*****  
 _Alone, alone, all, all alone,_  
Alone on a wide, wide sea!  
And never a saint took pity on  
My soul in agony.

_The many men, so beautiful!_  
And they all dead did lie:  
And a thousand, thousand slimy things  
Lived on; and so did I. 

from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

****

With a touch of vertigo Hornblower watched the apparition before him age four decades and become Captain Kennedy. Hair thinner, eyebrows thicker, all softness chiselled away by by the sea, windburned, comely and grinning like an idiot.

He could not help but grin in return, the instinctive handshake becoming an enfolding embrace.

"Archie. How long have you been lurking here?"

Kennedy fished extravagantly for his watch before replying, his breath smoking in the frigid air. "One hour, twelve minutes and, hmm. thirty-nine seconds. After the first fifteen minutes or so I was fairly sure you had no idea I was here, so - I waited. I just had to hope you'd come to your senses before one of us froze solid." He clapped his gloved hands together. "The frost has nipped my nose short enough as it is. And you, you are shaking... I'd be quite grateful to get moving again now. That is - if you'vefinished." He indicated the little grave with a shrug.

"Yes. Yes, thank you, I think, quite finished."

Kennedy took Hornblowers arm, and started to shepherd him out of the churchyard, rattling happily, apparently satisfied to fillHornblower's silence.

"It is good to see you again - it must be at least, oh, eight years? How long have you been in Portsmouth? Where are you staying - The Lamb? No - The George, of course - your card caused quite a stir at home this morning. I'm afraid John was being a little over-protective when you called. We only got back in to Portsmouth yesterday evening. This damned easterly kept the Plymouth Packet hove to for twelve hours, before the wind veered two points and the steam tug could bring us in. John seems to think that old men like you and I need sleep and warm fires and tea after adventures. He may be right - I've had precious little sleep, I left Teignmouth straight from the funeral." 

Kennedy paused suddenly, appalled. "I'm sorry, I mean, you did know? - I assumed .?"

"I know. I read the announcement in The Times."

Kennedy resumed their walk. "I thought as much as when I followed you this morning. A little strange, perhaps, to come all this way to see poor old Clayton, now, after all these years - but to be quite frank, Horatio, you were always an unpredictable cove - in some matters at least."

They walked on in silence for half the length of the street until Hornblower replied, a little puzzled himself by the oddity.

"It was the date. The co-incidence. I just had see the stone to be sure. That the dates were the same." 

Kennedy studied him shrewdly, the smile subdued. ""The date? Hmm. I suppose it's as good a reason as any- well, here we are, Casa Kennedy. Small - but snug enough for an ancient mariner of independent means."

And indeed they had descended through Southsea to the same narrow house, and smartly painted door. As the young manservant he'd spoken to earlier divested them of coats and hats, Hornblower wondered if more heads were turned among Kennedy's neighbours by John's copper-dark skin, the blue blck tattoos on his face, or by his exquisite beauty.

In the fire in the parlour, had sunk in the grate, and Hornblower, moving towards iit with sudden relief, narrowly avoided stepping on a remarkably ugly, yellow dog, the colour and texture of a second hand wig, which had been dozing on the rug. It growled disagreeably at him, as it rose and loped mournfully towards his host.

Kennedy made the introductions: "Admiral Hornblower, I am please to present Admiral Jervis, Lord St Vincent - Now, don't look at me like that! You must admit the likeness!"

The dog wheezed asthmatically, and Hornblower found himself balanced between irritation and anidiotic impulse to giggle. As a young man Kennedy had grown thin and frayed through three years service as Old Jervey's flag-lieutenant. There was indeed something disturbingly familiar about the jutting eyebrows, crooked teeth and asthmatic wheeze.

Kennedy stooped to fondle the old dog's ears. "Besides, I didn't have the naming of him. He's one of Edward's many strays, and a miserable cur at present. He misses his master ... " Kennedy blinked, hard. "Now - you must make yourself at home - I have to see to one or two things about the house -. I'll see if anyone has thought to keep us in tea or brandy while I've been at Teignmouth. You will dine with me, won't you?"

Hornblower stiffened. "Thank you, but I've already ordered dinner at The George."

"Nonsense - we haven't travelled four hundred miles and eight years between us, on an occasion such as this, to dine alone."

"I would not impose on your hospitality." In fact, thought of food revolted Hornblower, unable to stomach more than tea and white bread for some five or six days. To push congealing flesh and pudding around his plate, in company, was a trial he could not face, when every mouthful tasted of blood and iron. 

Kennedy shot him another sharp, appraising look "Well, you must suit yourself, of course. My table will be pretty sparse at this notice." He stooped to take the dog's collar "Come on Jervie: Even if we don't seem to be standing on rank today I suspect two old Admirals in one room will be one too many, and one of them should retire to the kitchen..."

Hornblower was left alone in this strange room, cheeks burning. On more than one encounter, in the years since they had been shipmates and friends, he had, in moments of irritation or depression, used his superior rank to wound Kennedy's feelings, and soothe his own. He was now deeply uneasy, with no idea why he was here, in the company of a chattering fool who must soon be fussing with caddies and spirit kettles and spoons and cups. His company was too full of unspoken confidences, and the awkwardness of long-dead adolescent desires.

Calling on Kennedy, he realised had been a mistake, an afterthought, a final courtesy. He was not in Portsmouth for company, but because Portsmouth would always be the beginning and end of all journeys, and his was now at an end. He only lingered because he dreaded the cold of those last few steps alone, to the silence and solitude of an empty room at The George, where no one would interrupt an Admiral's silence, and he would at the last be alone with nothing but a bare grate, a writing case and his razor.

This room was too warm, too full of its tenant, his personality and life. Sparely but comfortably furnished, with many practical, seaman-like contrivances, and remembrances of Kennedy's career. A shell, a hindoo idol, a Moroccan vase full of badly inked pens, a sketch of an creamily pale odalisque rising from her bath, a whale's tooth, a music stand, a table and desk both piled with books and portfolios. Neat, warm, masculine – orderly despite the piles of books and papers, bright and fresh despite the weeks of absence. Perhaps this was the small quiet inconsequential domesticity that Maria and he might have achieved in time. 

Hornblower drew closer to the desk and browsed through the eclectic selection on its surface. A novel by a Mr Disraeli, half the pages uncut, the proof of a treatise on naval ordinance, carefully annotated in red ink, a folder of fantastical views of the ruins of Egypt, two issues of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, a playbill for `Black Eye'd Susan' at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, Illustrations of Political Economy by Miss. Martineau. 

Among the beautifully bound books above the desk one battered little board octavo caught his eye. It sat familiarly in his hand, a tiny copy of Antony and Cleopatra that had been his for all of eighteen months on The Indefatigable – the torn title page, salt water stains, a fine spray of brown that he knew was human blood, a sketch in the margin of a sailor in a toga. It had once been the most precious thing he owned. His hand shook A slip of paper, freshly cut, fell to the desk, and his blood ran cold.

It was the same notice from the Times which had started this last journey, delivered to his breakfast table five days since, which had stolen his long preserved peace, his sleep, his appetite, and filled his nostrils with the stink of powder and and blood, and his waking hours with the constant companionship of the dead.

*****  
Saturday, January 26th 1833

Lord Exmouth

We have to announce the death of Lord Exmouth, Vice  
Admiral of England. He expired at half-past 6 o'clock on  
Wednesday morning, in the 67th year of his age, at his house  
at Teignmouth, and surrounded by his family, one of whom,  
the Rev. Edward Pellew, Dean of Norwich, had only arrived  
in time to take stand by the death-bed on which  
the most honoured hero of the British navy, and a man the  
most amiable in all the social endearments of domestic life,  
was closing his last scene.

His Lordship had been for a considerable time suffering  
under severe illness, in the first stage of which he became  
quite delirious, and was wholly engrossed with the idea that  
he was then actually engaged in fighting the Dutch fleet. A  
few days before his death he appeared to feel himself better,  
and in noticing the improvement, said "I have lately been  
going to leeward, but now I think I am working to windward  
again." He has left two sons, the present Lord Exmouth, a  
Captain in the navy, and the Hon. Captain Fleetwood  
Pellew, and we believe one daughter, Lady Halstead. His  
Funeral, in obedience to his own wishes, is to be strictly  
private.

Every reader of our naval annals must be familiar  
with his long and brilliant career of service during the eventful  
war of 1793. At the commencement of the contest he re-  
ceived the honour of Knighthood for the first capture of a French  
frigate, and a few years after he was further rewarded  
with the dignity of baronet, for his heroic benevolence in  
saving, at the imminent hazard of his own life, the whole  
crew of the Dutton, when that ship was driven on shore  
in a dreadful gale at Plymouth.

********

_His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm_  
Crested the world: his voice was propertied  
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;  
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,  
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,  
There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas  
That grew the more by reaping: his delights  
Were dolphin-like; they show'd his back above  
The element they lived in: in his livery  
Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were  
As plates dropp'd from his pocket. 

from Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

*****

The room grew darker. At each minute he expected the lamps to be lit, but no servant appeared. Coals spat and settled in the grate. The wind rattled the sash. Tea lay untouched in the cup in his hand. His mouth was dry

And Archie Kennedy sat opposite him in silence. Watching. Watch and watch about. 

The obituary lay on the table, half hidden beneath a portfolio, where he had too hurriedly laid it when interrupted. He had blushed, shamed and furious to be found, reading, and re-reading those oddly intimate paragraphs, as if peering at a rumpled bed through a door left minutely ajar. 

There was something indefinable, challenging in that long silence. In its space Hornblower's thoughts whirled without rest or respite. It now seemed to him that he had walked into a carefully laid trap, that some confrontation or intimacy that he had no strength to bear was about to unfold, that he could see no way to escape. He tried to fix on some fact or figure or calculation that would give him an edge, but he was numb. All that his mind would settle on, was the memory of a child he had once seen, long before, waiting quietly on deck to be hung.

At last, before stillness could strangle them both, Kennedy spoke, "That was almost the very last thing I was able to do for Edward. I penned it, and posted it, then started to pack. They still managed to muff his age, and the names of the children, which will cause no little argument, but I will not being going back to hear it, thank God. I should have written - I would have written - but I didn't have the words. I little thought to find you here at my fireside. 

"But then, I didn't find you here at all, I found you taking root at quite another graveside… I confess, the co-incidence of the date had not struck me - you must have a memory like a man-trap." 

Hornblower shuddered. The unyielding iron jaws had closed on his flesh at dinner, days before, at a dinner for the French Ambassador, at the moment when the painted fat fool had wiped a watering eye and toasted the sainted Louis of France, martyred 40 years before and all Admiral Hornblower had felt was the sudden chill of a Portsmouth night, and a voice repeating "he's dead, you fool, he's dead" _and I haven't been able to get the taste of corruption out of my mouth since..._

"And now, Horatio, I have no idea what you expect from me. Fireside reminiscences? Pillow anecdotes of the great man, one ageing catamite to another - I'm sorry, I do I shock you? After all these of silence?

"Would you have answered? Come to us in Teignmouth had I written to you six weeks ago?"

"I ... " Hornblower's own voice surprised him. "I do not know."

"Honestly A journey of 3 days, in December, to listen to the ramblings of a dying man - one to whom you had not spoken in ten years?" 

"It would not have appropriate…"

"Well, perhaps it was not for you to decide."

"If he had asked. Yes."

"But not at my request." Kennedy bent to stab the fire. His face was hidden, but red light flared over the room, reflected back from every shell and shelf and frame. "So. I will tell you what you would have found, had you come. And you will listen. I need to tell someone who may still care, a little, and then I will never speak of it again.

To be frank, I had seen little enough of Edward myself for the past few years. He didn't travel; an apoplexy left him with a stiffness in one side, and I was occupied with the transfer of the ordinance yard and my work here in at the Academy. I even let the house in Plymouth. We exchanged letters, suggesting I would join the family in this month, or that, in the autumn, in the spring, next summer... but it was Lady Exmouth - Susannah - who called me back to Teignmouth, in November, when he fell sick.

"You see, there is a terrible burden of intimacy in nursing. At least for a wife, or lover. Worse still for a child perhaps. But terrible enough if you have shared a – closeness."

Hornblower stirred again, and cleared his throat, but Kennedy forestalled him 

"Do not interrupt. You once valued truth, before you became a politician. Susannah wrote that while she would take her share as a wife – that as Edward's - friend- I should also have a place there. In all those years, it was the only time she had been – forthright - about what she had lived with. A small enough revenge – a sort of parley between us - to share with me the soiled sheet and chamber pot, the ruin of what was once strong, but I'm grateful for it. He was washed and changed by hands that knew and cared for every bare inch of him."

Another coal fell in the grate, and lit Kennedy's face. "So very sick. For so long. At the last there seemed to be almost nothing left. Like wrack after a storm, clinging to the tideline. I swear you could see the weave of the sheet through his skin. Even his voice was a reed. I think he stayed alive from sheer bloody-mindedness. Fighting the Dutch. For some reason, when fevered Edward was convinced he was on the quarterdeck of the old Charlotte, fighting the hardest fucking battle of his life. There was nothing to be done but stand to quarters and join in, between mopping and dosing. We must have refought the action 5 - 6 times - It drove his sons to distraction, but I almost enjoyed myself. Almost.

"One night, I dozed and I woke to find him watching me, quite himself. You see, I was almost right, we had very little more left to say, but in the end that isn't what matters. I found that thirty years had passed, and, to my surprise, I was, to all intents and purposes, in all that time, a married man.

"He fell asleep with old Jervie snoring at the foot of the bed, and the rest of us trying to keep some kind of peace between us, around him. That's all there is, in the end, hours spent counting the silence between one breath and another.

"You and I have seen so many men die – 500-600 at a stroke, damn me, and I'll never quite understand what I saw that morning. Just the quiet space between one breath – and the next that never comes."

Kennedy looked down at his hands, scored and blue where powder had been blasted beneath the skin in a lifetime of fighting the guns he'd grown to love.

"It's like losing a book one day. A very ordinary familiar book. Just mislaying it. It's not stolen, nor thrown aside, or burnt. It must be in the house, you believe, forgotten in some drawer, or fallen behind a bookcase. You think nothing of it, waiting for it to show it's self again, and suddenly you are old, and the house is empty, and you realise that you will never see or read that book again. That it fell out of your life for good and you hardly knew it. And the loss is – unbearable."

"Archie…."

"And now I'm some kind of comic spare widow. Susannah gets the Lodge, and the Meissen and linen, and the condolences of West Country society, and I get his second best chronometer and a bad tempered stray dog no one but Edward Pellew ever saw the virtue in. Oh, I'm not undone yet, friend – or I at least I will be well enough tomorrow, believe me. After all this brings just a little closer the day when I hoist my flag at last. A few more harsh winters like this one, a season of over rich dinners at Whitehall should thin out the ranks above me on the list, and I might even die an Admiral myself at the last. 

"I'll haul down my flag here soon. The house is leased to the quarter day and no further. The merger is done with; the ordinance yard thrives without me. I've been playing with guns and powder far too long for a grown man. I shall travel – somewhere warm, be damned. Rome, Egypt, Syria. I'll see the Pyramids again before I'm bed-ridden

"So, like Cleopatra, "My desolation does begin to make a better life" – strange that I should have to wait a life-time to understand what that meant - I always thought I should be a Mark Antony– now I discover that I'm Cleopatra after all. And without an asp, as such. Admiral Jervie is ugly enough company, but I don't believe his bite is poisonous.

"I have only one task left to perform, and when I've done that, it's over, and I'm a free man again. But I would prefer not to dine alone tonight. Now, will you stay?"

Hornblower was startled into warmth, by the grief and the suddenness of the "Of course. I will stay."

********

_Young boys and girls_  
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,  
And there is nothing left remarkable  
Beneath the visiting moon. 

from Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

********

The thought of food still unsettled Hornblower. His stomach was shrunken by days without appetite, and Kennedy’s apologies had done nothing to allay his anticipation of a scratch meal, culled at a few hours notice from a dismal February market, or ordered in from the communal stockpots of some steamy local chophouse.

And It was true he took very little more than bread and wine -that very little more delicately prepared, designed to warm and delight the palate of an old man lately tossed on the Plymouth Packet. Lenten food, a thick pea soup, two palely plump boiled fowl, sharp with lemon, baked apples, but so all finely skimmed and seasoned and served that he found himself taking a second or third mouthful for pleasure alone.

He saw no other servant than Archie’s black valet, still dressed in bright blue jacket and scarf, who opened the door through to the tiny dining room, and discretely withdrew after each service. He suspected now that like many of his peers, like Hornblower himself, Archie had settled on the services of a seaman on the beach, neat and self-sufficient, exotic in aspect, but achingly familiar in habit. If John Ferdinand’s hand had supplied the faint tang of cayenne in the soup, the ginger in the syrup, then he was a prize above most.

Slowly the wine and and unsought for pleasure sent a new warmth through Hornblower’s veins. Just once as he lifted his glass to his mouth he was alarmed to find that it shook with a fine tremor. With vast effort of will he lowered it to the table, and held his hand there until the shaking had stilled.

He glanced up to meet Archie’s eyes, but there was no question there, and after a few long seconds his companion simply continued his own meal, and asked after the health of some mutual acquaintance in London. Perhaps this was enough for the present, this circle of warm light, and the subdued presence opposite him, cradling his glass, apparently lost in his own thoughts and memories.

It was not until the last plates were cleared, leaving brandy and walnuts and crumbled napery on the emptied cloth, that Kennedy returned to the circumstances of their meeting.

“Poor old Clayton. He always wanted to serve on a frigate and make his fortune. To go home to Edinburgh with prizes and a gold laced coat, and set up for a gentleman. The last of the those he had achieved and barely knew it ” He raised his glass. “To George Clayton, Gentleman." 

And in that instant Hornblower knew what had driven him here, to the beginning, to sit with the one other man still living who knew them both, the long dead Midshipman and the newly dead Admiral, who had nothing in common but themselves, and the date of their death 40 years apart. 

He raised his own glass. "George Clayton. And Edward Pellew - the brandy glowed, and burned in his mouth and chest.

“– and not to forget - William Bush, of course" Kennedy returned, "A truly great seaman. Sadly abbreviated about the lower limbs…” Kennedy waved a hand vaguely …”but even then – magnificent!” He rolled the final word on his tongue as if savouring it with the spirit.

And Hornblower, looking through the gleam of candle at Kennedy’s wry smile realised with a sudden bleak and chilling despair that this chattering fool had had Bush. His Bush. And was pleased to let Hornblower know of histheft, after 20 years.

Kennedy continued, with a coolness of tone that suggested that something more calculating than the brandy he swirled speculative in his glass fuelled his words. “Poor, dogged, faithful Bush. A Post-Captain despite himself. It took so little in the way of my attentions to get him to speak of you. Just the gratitude that we had the power to send him back to you at Le Havre in the year fourteen. What a life you must have led him. Such a poor bargain he won from me in the end.… " His eyes gleamed with something almost, but not quite, like triumph. "He was foolish enough to love the unlovely Horatio Hornblower, so condemned to a life of hard service. He loves Horatio, so to gratify your self-laothing you had to make of him a block of stone, unfeeling, unthinking…”

Hornblower snapped in fury – “ He was none of those things… ” and gound himself choaked with rage – at Archie for this evidence of his prying, into the most secret and silent parts of his life, at himself for the lack of care and weakness which had betrayed him. 

Archie’s hand, iron hard on his wrist, prevented him from rising. Too late now he recognised the true nature of the trap into which he had walked.

“I told you, Horatio, I had one last task to perform before I was free. And you swore not to leave before I discharged it. I promised to deliver this into your hands, or to destroy it - and I am sure this is my one chance to do the former.” 

He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket with one hand, for the letter he placed on the table between them.

 

******

The hand on the wrapper was spidery, unfamiliar, but not the salutation – or the seal.

To Admiral The Lord Hornblower, KG, KB  
by hand

Hornblower wanted Kennedy to withdraw, to allow him to read in private, but was allowed no quarter. Stiff backed in he broke the seal

A small tissue wrapped package fell to the cloth. _“My dear Horatio”_ it began, 

_"That you are reading this means that I am dead, which may be, in the natural course of things, a matter of more pain to yourself than it could possibly be to me now._

_"I have been remiss in my friendship of late, and so write this to bid you farewell as I wish I had taken the chance to do in life._

_"And this is I fear a cowardly act, for I should have had the courage to admit my mistakes to your person. But something of reserve lies between us now, and to my regret I believe it to my responsibility through a sin of omission._

_"You are a creature of strong and passionate sensibility; your very impulsiveness, courage and humanity first brought you to my notice all those many years ago, and made you dear to me – yet in teaching you to curb those qualities, in preparing you for command through self-command, I fear that I may have destroyed something infinitely precious in you._

_"I must now acknowledge that I have lost all opportunity to put this to right, as I might have done many years ago._

_"The life of command is hard, and solitary, yet I have had the benefit of companionship, and I have learnt to take honest joy in it at last._

_"Know now what I never spoke of then, that I loved you dearly, that I love you still, and wished at the end that I had had the moral strength to tell you in person._

_"If the advice of a very old and foolish man has any weight with you still, it would be this – Fuck the admiralty, fuck service, position and honour, fuck where ever you find care and compassion and liking. Seize happiness where and when you can. Keep a dog. Keep a whore. Keep a good cellar, and wear warm clothing. Live well even if you cannot live long._

_"I commend Captain Kennedy to you, into whose hands I will place this. For many years I believed he was under my protection and guidance – now, at the last I understand that I have been, all this time, under his._

_"God speed to you, my friend._

_Edward Pellew,_

_Post Script – I have also to gift you some small items of remembrance One I hope you will be pleased to accept as a poor token of my friendship. The second I’m afraid is evidence of a petty theft which I hope you can forgive, as the wearer was so dear to me in all.”_

Two frail skeins slithered out of the tissue in Hornblower’s hand, one fine silky wisp of pure white hair, a cleanly plaited, and a tiny wad of black silk. which, unfolded, proved to be a ribbon, rusty and fragile from long storage, which might once have been used to tie an officer’s hair.

*****

Something gripped Hornblower's chest, and he thought the pain of it would kill him. The room was close and airless. The back of his eyes prickled, and he could not catch his breath. 

He crushed the letter and its contents in his hand, and started to rise, conscious of a great pit opening out before him, and the need to tread carefully if he was not to fall before he made the safety of the door, and the chill night beyond it. 

Something loomed between him and his goal. he tried to brush it aside. “I'm sorry. I must leave now. ” The walls and floor seemed to waver and distort before him. 

“No!. Not now. Not this time.” And Hornblower found himself thrown back against the wall, his chair tottering beneath him. 

Archie’s forearm was pressed against his throat, his face looming inches away, flushed and furious. He was suddenly aware of the vast strength still housed in his companion’s broad shoulders. His own hands grasped at the straining cloth over Kennedy’s back, but could find no purchase, and the pressure at his throat increased. There was no strength or will in him to fight, just an angry determination to avoid the weakness of tears at his final defeat, or to meet his enemy's eyes.

He fixed instead on a scattering of blue flecks on Archie’s cheek, where grains of gunpowder had been driven under the skin by the daily murder of their trade. "Horatio. I’ve watched you stalk out of one too many door, with your lips pursed and your arse strapped on backwards, *sir* This time - you - stay - and - answer, whether you want to or no” and he punctuated his statements with renewed pressure, that forced Hornblower further against the wall. Over Kennedy’s shoulder he saw opening door, and the servant’s concerned face appear. - “Out. Now. Close the door and leave us.” Kennedy barked, without turning

And they were alone.

“Poor Horatio. The great observer, the analyst who sees and calculates all, and understands so very little. You. You walk blithely into my home after all these years. You read in passing about the death of a man I shared with for 30 years, and still manage to turn my life to ashes in a few short hours. Trust me - I had not known what grief was until you came.

“Look at you, look at what the great Edward Pellew made of you, of his model midshipman, his great experiment. He remade you of ice and stone, you are barely human, warming your hands at the faint candle of other men's sorrow. You are dying, here, in front of me, and I hardly think you know it.”

"Then let me pass", Hornblower spat ice and iron, "I have no idea how or why I have ever so offended you, or why I inspire such loathing.  
I will leave, and then will ensure my existence can never trouble more." And then suddenly hot fury and tears burst through him. "Did you have to take them all? Out of spite? Everything, and everyone of my - friends? Did you collect them, like books and shells?" he thought he might vomit. "Oh god, let me pass!"

"No. If you run and hide yourself now, as you have always done, you dishonour them all - Edward, William, Frederick - You dishonour the sacrifice that Clayton made for you. What are you always running from? This?” Kennedy’s hand closed painfully around Hornblower's own, still holding Pellew’s letter – “from whatever Edward finally found it in himself to write to you? From whatever courage he found in himself at the end…?

“Did you think you were forgotten? Did you think he took you once, twice, out of lightness or carelessness, as a trophy, or as some routine Captain's privilege? 

"I doubt there was a single day in 30 years when you didn’t enter our thoughts, or conversation. In dark times news of you came to us from afar, like lights over water. We silently hoarded every scrap of you. We plotted and schemed to keep you as safe and well as we could, in all those years apart. 

"You look so terrified. Poor old Horatio. A hero, so sure he is loved by none, least of all himself. So what hope for a Clayton, or a Bush or even Sir Edward Pellew? What hope for me… You despise yourself, and so must despise and pity all those foolish and blind and weak and desperate enough to love you. You despise me still, even now.”

With the finality of that confession, strength and fury seemed to drain Kennedy. He stepped back, pale with shame, and Hornblower found himself able to breathe again, if not to speak

“I’m sorry, Horation. Forgive me. Forget what I have said. I am hardly angry with you, in all love…. Not you…It's just - what he did was cruel. He formed you for service, his offering to the world, the perfect officer – but he couldn’t give you the secret joy of it – the jest of it all, and he saw too late that you didn't have the means to find it alone. He let you out into the world to do the work he made you for. Me, I suspect he kept with him as some kind of penance. I want to mourn him, and I find my sorrow poisoned in knowing this."

“Archie…”

"Go. I should not have stopped you. I should not have followed you this morning, not with this bile in me."

Horatio moved as if to push past him and paused. He reached out for a second to touch the little blue scars with his finger tip, an odd expression on his face. "I think – Archie, I think he had no pity for me - he knew I would endure without out it. But you, you I think he simply loved.”

Kennedy’s hand slid up to cover his own, and press the palm of it against his lips. “ I should have known better than to trust you for an instant. I thought you were harmless at last, but you still just turn and hand my whole life back to me in an instant. How did we ever bring each other to this pass, hmm?”

Still meaning to leave, still meaning to make one last gesture of farewell, Hornblower instead found himself grasping Kennedy's face fiercely between both hands, and kissing him with a shock that set their teeth ringing. Kennedy's hands fluttered inconclusively in the air beside them, before settling tentatively on his neck and hair. The icy thing inside him tilted and cracked, the sudden flow of blood to his belly and knees made it hard to stand straight, making him gasp for air. He rested his forehead against Kennedy's.

“Archie, believe me - I never despised you, , believe me. I - think I feared and envied you for… I only wanted to keep you safe, safe from me, clean. All I ever do is - break things. ”

“Horatio, I don't break - at least not easily. I'm built to bounce, for God's sake. I know what I am. I have always known it, and the fear of it almost destroyed me. You saved me, both of you, and every day since has been full of sunlight. Days you gave me. I can't regret a single single day, believe me. Even now. , Without you, without him. I have lived, I have been loved, and loved in return. Because of you.”

Hornblower seemed hardly to hear him. He was gazing, puzzled at Kennedy's eyes, blue and candid, the eyes of a midshipman perched on the fore cross tress, glittering in light reflected from a sea a hundred feet below. “Your eyes are full of sails” and he giggled, and the adult man was horrified at the madness now swamping him, giggling like an boy, and Archie was grinning as idiotically back and he now no longer cared, in the presence of the one being who knew that he was only Horatio, a fond, foolish lonely boy a long way from home. He slid further down the wall, his throat bared, a single cold tear finally spilling down his cheek, feeling a trail of soft kisses along the line of his jaw

Its a curious sensation – the reality of textured tanned skin under his fingertips and astored memory of the silky sweet hide of the 18 year old Archie had been. His lips are opening to a mouth which tastes of salt, and brandy and the sea, and the clean scent of limes and bay rum envelops him. He returns the kiss as fiercely, biting and scratching, and clawing at Archie’s coat, barely held upright until they both stumble, against the chair, against the table, books spill from the case behind him, and glass and brandy and walnuts and silver and limbs are sent sprawling in one confused tangle.

The sound of breaking glass and splintering wood must have broken the last of John Ferdinand's reserve, because suddenly he in the room with them, the dog yapping and snarling and snapping at the margins to add to the confusion, as the valet helps Archie to his feet, brushing glass from his coat, standing protectively between them, as if fending off an assault on his master.

Not protectively. Possessively.

Cold seeped back into his bones, to replace the hot shame of madness and exposure. There is one last chance to retrieve himself from this wreck intact.He bowed. “My apologies, Captain Kennedy. I will leave at once", and turning to the other man he added, "Be so kind as to fetch my hat and scarf.” 

The steady dark hand gentle on Archie's arm, the slight touch with which the valet is reassured. He tried to walk towards the door, past Archie, without meeting his eyes.

“Horatio, “ He still dare not turn, but could not move, towards or from the door. “Horatio. This will be a final parting. Take my hand."

"I can not"

"Look at me. Please"

\- and Horatio turned and reached for Archie’s outstretched hand with all the desperation of a drowning man who feels bitter salt water close over his head for the third time, and chooses, at the last, to rise and live again.

******

On a winter's night in the February of 1833 a casual viewer would have seen the door of the house in Smith Street open. A single figure paused briefly in the warm light spilling out on the icy pavement, before gathering his coat around him, and making his way downwards into the town. Only once did he stop, to turn for a few seconds, and watch the light in the window behind him dim, and the glow of a candle move past the fanlight and the stair casement, into the first floor front.

It might be that some seaman's sense told him at that moment that the wind had shifted round to the warm west, bringing thaw, rain and the smell of the sea. Within the hour ships would be spreading sail, and slipping gracefully from harbour, too weather-wise to ignore this breeze that could carry them on the first long beat, away from England, to the Baltic, the Mediterranean, the scented East Indies.

He hunched his shoulders, and turned to walk alone, through the long narrow streets onto the Hard, and to the borrowed warmth and fug and clamour of the George Inn.

*******

In the glimmer of that same candle light Captain Archibald Kennedy dozed, dreaming fitfully, as old men will, of scudding clouds and waves, and the vast seas spread out beneath his feet like a meadow flecked with flowers of foam.

He started once, at the sound of a stifled cry from the street, then relaxed, drawing the long body next to him a little closer.

He too could sense the change in the wind. His rheumatic knee would ache and balk tomorrow - perhaps he really would travel this spring. He really was too old for this. Rome, or Naples, Athens. Somewhere blue and warm, not too far from the sea.

The arm draped across his waist tightened convulsively, and he drew his companion closer still, resting his chin protectively over the curls of his hair. Horatio Hornblower lay beside him, insensible, apparently talked out, and the darkness hid the grey in his hair.

Below Kennedy heard the front door close, as John Ferdinand returned, laden from his errand at the George.

John was another complication to consider in the suddenly all too complicated life. But one he could deal with in the morning. 

****

_Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,_  
Yet she sailed softly too;  
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze -  
On me alone it blew. 

_We drifted o'er the harbour bar_  
And I with sobs did pray -  
O let me be awake, my God!  
Or let me sleep alway. 

_The harbour-bay was clear as glass,_  
So smoothly it was strewn!  
And on the bay the moonlight lay,  
And the shadow of the Moon. 

from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

**Author's Note:**

> The Obituary for Edward Pellew is authentic, exactly as it appeared in the The Times in 1833.  
> So is the co-incidence of the date - allowing for the time it would have taken for news of Louis XVI execution to reach Portsmouth, the historical Edward Pellew died 40 years to the day after the fiction Midshipman Clayton.
> 
> It seemed too apt a coincidence not to provide an opportunity for Hornblower not to review his life and his career, the many losses he endured in their course.


End file.
